The term "Commedia all'italiana" refers to a film genre that arose in Italy during the fifties of the twentieth century and developed in the following sixties and seventies. An expression coined by the film "Divorzio all'italiana", one of the greatest film successes of the time winner at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival for best comedy and the Oscar winner for best original screenplay.
But what is Italian comedy and how has this film genre changed the customs and traditions of post-war Italy? To do so, we borrow the words of Mario Monicelli, who with "I soliti ignoti" was the protagonist in 1958 of this new vein." The Italian comedy is this: to treat with comic, funny, ironic, humorous terms of topics that are instead dramatic. This is what distinguishes Italian comedy from all other comedies."
Taking a step back a few years, it was Totò who made this film genre mainstream – for the time, of course – thanks to Mattoli's masterpiece "Miseria e Nobiltà". A postcard of a popular Naples in which two families find themselves sharing a small apartment out of necessity. Here, among bunk beds, laundry clothes, jobs that are about to fall into disuse (the scribbler) a love scam is hatched to convince a famous cook to grant approval for the marriage of his son with a woman from humble origins.
It is an Italy that awakens from the rubble and tries to make its way, through cinema, to rebuild a culture shattered with the twenty years of fascism. A less buttoned-up country in which everything is no longer under the control of the Istituto Luce or MinCulPop and social differences can be told through stereotypes and caricatures. A genre, that of Italian comedy, which inherits the canons of neorealism and that always starts from daily news events expertly revisited by the screenwriters of the time. The element of satire had always served to tell the changed behaviors and tendencies of a society: taking a further leap into the past we can get to Aristophanes for the classical Greek theater, to Plautus and Terence for the Latin one and, gradually, to authors such as Molière or Goldoni.
Dino Risi and Mario Monicelli stand as protagonists behind the camera to immortalize sacred monsters such as Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren, Stefania Sandrelli, Vittorio Gassman, Alberto Sordi, Lando Buzzanca and Vittorio De Sica, just to name a few. A production that won multiple Academy Awards thanks to the pens of screenwriters such as Eduardo De Filippo, Alberto Moravia and Cesare Zavattini.
The Italian comedy has cleared vices and virtues at every latitude, also telling the themes of discrimination in the suburbs, the sometimes redundant and unnecessarily obsequious bad habits of the upper middle class up to the goodness coming from a single common denominator: the people. Proud and sincere, despite the many difficulties that accompanied a historical period of reconstruction.
And it is thanks to the push of the people that this film genre found verve and consensus between the north and south of the country, uniting Italy thanks to the simultaneous spread of a means of communication that would irreparably upset the habits of Italian users in a short time: television.
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